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SET Women - Leicestershire Women in Science Engineering & Technology

e-Book - Caitriona Jackman - Postgraduate in Space Physics

"Science is in fact one of the most creative and rewarding career paths, because there is always something new to learn"

For her Irish Leaving Certificate, Caitriona studied many different subjects, including Maths, Physics, Chemistry, French and Music. Physics was her real interest, and so she pursued a BSc in Applied Physics at the University of Limerick. As an undergraduate, she and twenty other Irish students attended the London International Youth Science Forum. There she heard a lecture from a space plasma physicist from the Mullard Space Science Laboratory that would change her life. "I was so excited about his work that I pestered him for several months until I was able to get a work placement with him in my third year."

At Mullard, the space and climate physics department of UCL, she worked on the Cassini Huygens space mission, the largest interplanetary spacecraft ever built and destined for a four-year tour of Saturn and its moons. Caitriona's work was to analyse and help calibrate data from the Electron Spectrometer instrument, while she was also involved with some public outreach in the form of a local museum space careers exhibition. "After this, I knew I wanted to continue to work on Cassini."

When she returned to Limerick for her fourth year research project, she chose the only topic in space science that the department offered: Galaxy Formation and Self-organised Criticality. "Self-organised criticality is related to the theory of how sand piles collapse. If you make a group of sand piles on a table, grain by grain, you find that some piles can grow larger than others before they collapse. What's interesting is that sometimes if you place a grain of sand on one pile, not only will it collapse, but the others on the table will, too." She explains that this is the type of model she used to predict the shape and structure of spiral galaxies, where a supernova occurring on one side of the galaxy can set off others, thus changing the shape and appearance of the entire galaxy.

Determined to get back into space mission science, Caitriona attended a joint Austrian and European Space Agency summer school just after finishing her first degree. By the autumn, she had returned to her true passion, studying data from the Cassini-Huygens mission , as a postgraduate at the University of Leicester.

Caitriona's work at Leicester has been to investigate Saturn's magnetosphere, or the environment controlled by the planet's strong magnetic field. She has studied how magnetic field conditions affect a band of Saturn's radio emissions (the kilometre long wavelengths of light) coming out from the planet. With data from Cassini, Caitriona and the team looked at the response of these emissions to bursts of charged particles from the Sun. The link was found through observations of the aurora on Saturn.

Just like on the Earth, magnetic field lines get compressed by solar wind impacts and then act like a railway track for the charged particles, trundling them along into the magnetic poles of the planet. As particles plough through the atmosphere, they strip electrons off of the gases and this makes the gases glow (just like neon lights). Caitriona has built a theoretical model of the processes that form these aurorae. This work took her to professional conferences, gave her publications even before she received her PhD, and helped fund the rest of her postgraduate study.

On the strength of her research work, Caitriona received the prestigious Margaret K Day Fellowship from the British Federation of Women Graduates. "The federation encourages participation in outreach activities to promote science to young people. So far, I've given talks to local astronomy clubs, been on national telly twice, and am a mentor for Aimhigher." She also recently appeared on BBC's Test the Nation with Gail Iles (also featured in this book) as a "rocket scientist," and has been a frequent scientific guest on programmes in Ireland. "I am the only Irish person working on the Cassini mission!"

After receiving her PhD, Caitriona is off to Imperial College London to take up a job as a research associate on the magnetometer instrument on Cassini. "I have been very lucky to have quite a varied scientific path thus far, having worked at a number of top institutions."

Learn more about Caitriona Jackman's work: Radio and Space Plasma Physics Group